Mailchimp Footers Default to English, and the Fix Is Manual

Quickbooky community desk: businesses that keep their books in QuickBooks often send customer newsletters through Mailchimp, the email marketing service Intuit owns. A recurring complaint concerns the footer at the bottom of those campaigns. That strip, which carries the unsubscribe link and the sender’s mailing address, arrives in English even when the rest of the message is in another language. No account setting switches it, and deleting it outright is not allowed. The fix accepted in the community thread is manual: edit each footer element, then rebuild its links with merge tags.

Footers arrive in English by default

Every template in the campaign builder ships with a footer block attached. Its contents display in English out of the box, and the editor offers no language switch for them. French-language senders raised the issue, though the behavior is identical for any audience.

You write the body of a campaign yourself, so it reads however you want. The footer is generated for you, and generation happens in English. Switching templates does not help, because every template carries the same block. The only route in is manual editing.

The elements a footer must keep

Anti-spam law and the service’s terms of use require two things in every campaign: a working unsubscribe link and a physical postal address. The referral badge, the small credit line at the foot of free-plan messages, is different. It rides along with the free plan rather than with the law, so its presence follows the subscription, not the sender’s jurisdiction. Translation should swap the visible wording only. Removing a required element to escape English would put the account at odds with the terms.

Translating the unsubscribe link

The unsubscribe link is the part readers notice first, so it comes first here. The edit happens in the campaign’s design view, inside the footer content block.

• Open the Content section of the campaign builder and choose Edit Design.
• At the Design step, click the footer content block to select it.
• Delete the default unsubscribe link.
• Type the wording you want subscribers to see.
• Highlight that text and click the link icon in the toolbar.
• In the link dialog, enter |UNSUB| in the web address field and insert it.

Those visible words can be any language; the tag does the real work. |UNSUB| stays wired to the platform’s opt-out system, so the translated link keeps functioning for every recipient. Enter the tag exactly as written, pipes and capitals included, because the syntax is unforgiving. An ordinary web address in that field would send readers to a dead end instead of a working opt-out.

The postal address and its hidden link

Postal addresses add a wrinkle. The default address tag pulls the address stored with your audience and, beside it, adds an English link inviting readers to save your contact details. Translating the block means breaking that pairing apart. Delete the combined address tag, |HTML:LIST_ADDRESS_HTML|, from the footer. In its place, type the translated address yourself, or use |LIST:ADDRESS|, which fetches the postal address without the English add-to-contacts wording. Readers abroad then see your address in their language instead of an English sentence next to it.

A few cautions before you edit

Get comfortable with the campaign builder and with merge tags before you start, because the whole method rests on them. Send yourself a preview of every translated campaign before it ships. A mistyped tag appears in the delivered message as literal text, and a preview is where you catch it. Accounts moved to the newer email creation tool should expect some menus to look different, and some steps may not carry over unchanged.

The footer’s language is the sender’s job, not the platform’s; plan the translation alongside the campaign itself. Handled that way, the last strip of your message reads like everything above it.